Bode Miller is among the worlds fastest skiers and is arguably the very best American to hit the slopes. He is one of the great legends of the sport. His style is wild and untamed, as was his childhood on a 450-acre homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire.

This film captures Millers unlikely story; his meteoric rise in the realm of the Alpine ski race where coaches and competitors laughed and gasped as Bode fell and sometimes won. It’s an odyssey with major injuries and alternative training methods en route to the top of World Cup competition.

But the prize is not just the victory of a single race, nor the crystal globe that marks the best skier of the season Bode’s won two but it’s a continued pursuit, some see it as a reckless pursuit, of performance that jumps off of others measure of good, bad, mediocre and excellent. This profile of skier Bode Miller is a journey into how we define success and failure.

Other people measure Bode’s success by his time at the end of the run, but for Bode success can be in a turn that no one but he has taken.

Flying Downhill: The Early Years takes the lens inside of the world that helped forge Bode Miller and provides insight into what makes Bode go so fast.